Wow! Can you believe it?

I received this notification in my e mail late on Wednesday!  I truely can't believe that she wants to show my work to women who have probably been weaving since childhood.  How flattering is that!  Of course I have no problem with her sharing my work!

Backstrap & Floor Loom Weaving commented on your photo.

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From:	Facebook ... Add to Contacts
To:	Pandula Arts

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Backstrap  &  Floor Loom Weaving commented on your photo.

Backstrap  &  Floor Loom Weaving wrote:
"Marsha,  I have been looking at your blog and work -- so fantastic!  I am learning backstrap weaving but never have enough time to practice!  I work with Guatemala artisan weavers thru 'Education And More' a nonprofit organization. I am going to print off these instructions and a copy of your picture of the pink scarf and see what they can design in weaving with a heart--- is that alright with you?  I want to see if they can weave hearts into some of their weavings.  Thanks"
To see the comment thread, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?photo.php&fbid=174164219291199&set=o.105831579471792&mid=385cc80G5af347d49bb2G50af6cG9&bcode=UFQDB&n_m=pandulaarts%40yahoo.com

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

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Dana's One skein project bag!

These are pictures of the panels that will be making up the project bag.  It will open on the long side.  I am not at all thrilled with three of these.  I had a difficult time with the warp if you notice some of the horizontal lines are way off.  And I definitely had a difficult time with centering the designs.  :-(

I can always weave some new panels if these don't work.  I guess I will have to wait until the bag is assembled to know.

Wiggles

Soooo, the only comments I got on yesterdays posting was about the little brown dog!  Just a little mutt dog but I love her.  My other dog Lacy is 12yrs. old and pretty sedentary.  Wiggles on the other hand is pretty busy. She also stays very cold.  We think she is Chihuahua, Dachshund and maybe a little Pug.  Thus a Chugeenie!  I love the way her little forehead wrinkles when she is concentrating (like a Pug) and her tail curls also.  She is long of body like the weenie dog too.  Sometimes her little face looks very Chihuahua and boy does she shiver when it is cold.  Anyway Ms. Carol bought her a couple of little outfits.  Check it out.

Just a little update!

So here we go with an update!  There are weavings that I couldn't show before Christmas because certain people were not supposed to see them.  There are also pics of yarn gifting.  Just scroll down and you will get the picture.

First, it's Wiggles, ever watchful and eternally cute!

This is the largest Gilmore Wave loom that I borrowed from KraftyMax.  Here you see it with my roommate's Christmas present on it.  She wanted a band to hang pictures of her dogs!  This one was verrrrrry long.

Here we have the first panel for a '1 skein project bag' for my weave workshop buddy.  I will make 5 of these panels, 4 for the body and 1 for the flap.  Each will be different and she wants it to open on the long side.  We decided mutually that she will assemble it so it is the way she wants it.  She is a graduate of Florida State University is how I decided on garnet with a little bit of gold.  I will post completed pics when it is indeed complete.

Now for the Christmas presents of yarn!  Here we have #10 Bamboo crochet thread.

I also received alot of cotton.  Here you see # 3 mercerized cotton crochet thread!  Lots of yummy colors.

Here we have a combination of #10 mercerized cotton crochet thread along with the #3's.  These are the best yarns for warpface weaving.  I don't have it in me to fight with hairy yarns that stick to each other and make the weaving ALOT less than enjoyable.

 

I think I am set for yarn for a little while!  I am soooooo looking forward to weaving just for the fun of it and experimenting with some new techniques.

Now for the best ever!  Here you see Crystal Pistal's custom made cotton warpface scarf.  She wanted it long and since she is in FL cotton works fabulously!  


She loves hearts and I threw in the X's and O's.  If you look close enough you might be able to see that one of the X's is made up of little x's and o's!  You might also notice that the design is only on one side!  Plain stripes on the other.  You can read more about how I discovered how to do this here!  It is my absolute best piece yet and she LOVED it!

I, unfortunately didn't take pictures of all of my completed pictures.  Somehow I simply forgot to do it. ;-{  But I am told that everything reached everyone on time and all of my family loved their gifts.  Seems to big talk was how much my weaving has changed and improved.  Merry Christmas to me.


I hope that you and yours had a lovely holiday!  Me I am actually just glad it has come and gone.  Lots of fun...lots of work and stress.  


NOW ON TO THE NEW YEAR!

Creative glitches...hate 'em!!!

Well here it is December 21st...I only have 2 small things left to weave, everything else is packaged and out the door.  Seems, as usual, that I have been thinking about Christmas for months.  Oh yeah...thaaaats right I have.  Takes a pretty long time to do all of these gifts by hand.  Not a single thing was bought for my Christmas, except the yarn to produce the pieces of course.

Just a little bit of update...since I haven't posted in over a week.

Carol went to Jacksonville about a week and a half ago...got broke down.  So I have been on my own for ten days (makes for alot of conversations with my dogs) LOL.  At that point I guess I decided mentally to take a break for all of the hub ub about Christmas.  At that point the GLITCH set in.  I should never have stopped long enough to take that breath, because since then I couldn't seem to weave anything...until yesterday. 

I want to make a cell phone pouch, (she just got a new Droid) and a one skein project bag ( she says she needs a 'small' project bag) for my weave workshop student, Dana.  So I warped up after looking at empty looms for a week...double threaded (meaning two threads in each heddle) and 75 warp ends.  On another project, which must remain a mystery due to the holiday thing, this became exactly 4 in wide.  Keep in mind alot of my yarns do not have tags on the cones.  So I have no way, most of the time, to know what size my thread is.  I think one of the ones I am currently looking at on the loom is a 20.  Very fine!  Much finer that I would choose.  Thus I only got 3 in. on this project, instead of the 4 in. I got on the other project that I warped the same way.  Bummer.  Droid won't fit in a 3 in. wide pouch, especially after the sides are stitched up.

So ALL I could do was stare at it and rethink my ideas.

SOOOOOOOOOO I loaned her one of my own pouches for her phone while I figure out what to do.  Then I warped up the small tapestry loom and thought I would make her a bag of each technique.  A weftface phone pouch and a warpface project bag.  Even though I would use my own homespun for the tapestry bag.  Turns out the roving is prettier than the yarn it produces.  First time that ever happened...not feeling the tapestry weave (weftface).  So I benched that one too.

After several days I thought that since I need to piece the warpface together to produce something larger...because it is too narrow as it stands... I would make her one project bag in panels.  Each panel will be different.  Dana only wants it to be about 6 to 8 in. wide and 12 in. long.  I figure I need at least 6, 12 in. x 3 in. wide panels.  Once they are sewn together that will produce a bag the size I need. She wants the long side to be the one that opens so we even discussed her sewing the bag together herself so that she gets exactly what she wants.

She is a huge Florida Seminoles fan as she went to college in Tallahassee, FL.  She also likes jewel tones.  I had her some over and we chose garnet and kind of a coral with gold trim.  Unfortunately the coral looks much pinker next to the garnet...hope she still likes it.  This project is definitely challenging me. 

I completed the first 12 in. band yesterday.  I did the 3d effect and it is stunning.  I think this is going to work.

I was also loaned the largest of the Gilmore Wave looms.  There is a picture of it here on the blog, it is the loom with the blue/purple warp on it.  Mine is the smaller Mini loom by the same company.  This way I can do a few larger pieces of warpface before I return it to my friend KraftyMax whose parents own Gilmore Looms.

Since we have no art stores here in Moultrie I asked Ms. Carol to also visit Joann's ETC. (much larger than a normal Joann Fabric store) in Jacksonville, FL.  I have a hard time finding mercerized cotton here so I had her spend about $40.00 there for me.  Lots of new colors to play with now.  After I complete my last 2 Christmas projects of course!  I promised Carol 2 red, white, and blue inkle bands to hang her dogs' pictures with.  She has these cut out mat boards that spell their names and the boards are red/white and blue.  Behind each letter she can place a picture of the appropriate dog, cute.  Piece of cake. 

Then I want to concentrate on trying double weave...or at least somehow figure out how to have a solid background on my warpface lifts.  No stripes or specs...it is possible that double weave is the only way to achieve this - that I have been able to understand anyway.  Remember all of the info I get is via books and internet.  The only weaving instructor around is me.  Also keep in mind that my loom is just as much table loom as inkle loom.  Not all inkle information works exactly the same way with a cloth and warp beam on the loom.  Lots of translating going on.

So No all I have to do is post pictures of these various activities.  Most of those will be posted through out the up-coming days...I realize that reading my blog is not of the UTMOST importance during the holidays.  So I will only post occasionally during the next couple of weeks.  Things will go back more to the norm after the New Year.

Hope you and yours are happy and enjoying the holidays to the fullest and in the safest ways possible. 

What's on the Loom????

I started another piece to use my loom to it's maximum capacity...and then I got a serendipitous surprise.  But let's start at the beginning.

I had tried to bring myself back into knitting and of course since I bit off on a fairly large project, and doubled stranded the yarn, I missed stitches, twisted stitches...I just have to keep reminding myself that I don't LIKE knitting.  It never has come easy to me, especially when I spent 2 yrs knitting socks for Christmas presents.  I LOVE the END result but the PROCESS stresses me immensely.  

So now I have to come up with something new.  SOOOOO...I tried to tie up a backstrap loom...another dismal failure  definitely too large a piece for a beginner like me.  I use alot of the techniques that the backstrap weavers use in their weaving's, but I prefer to do it on a rigid frame loom.  SOOOOOOO.....another dismal failure and now to avoid wasting the yarn, I wound the double stranded cotton into a huge ball.  I actually managed to save every inch.

SOOOOOO.....now what do I do?

I decided to put it on the Gilmore Mini Wave.  Since it was double stranded I decided to double strand the complimenting thread as well.

Since these are 100% cotton crochet thread in size #10, even when I maxed out the heddles on my loom, I never actually got the maximum WIDTH I wanted.  This time I did!  Four inches wide exactly.

Now for the big surprise.  I discovered that in warping this way (that is 2 threads in the same heddle treated as 1 thread), that when I do my pick ups for the design work I can pick and choose one of the other out of the heddle.  I think this is a sort of double face weave.  The results are that the front has the pick up design and the backside has horizontal stripes...with no wrong side...in other words the 'lifts' don't show on the back. They are actually hidden inside the the 2 layers.   

In some double weaves the design shows on both sides in reverse.  However, that also means that it is warped up pretty wide and then since you only use half of the threads it is much narrower when actually woven.  My width stays consistently the same.  You just don't see the reverse of the floats on the back.  This is a good thing as I don't really like seeing the back side.  If you look at the pictures previous posted on this blog of my scroll pieces you can definitely see the little dots of weft floats on the backside.  On this new piece you just see pretty stripes.  Wonderful.

Here is a taste of what is to come...

                                                 
                                                        This is the back side of the loom.

                                       Here are the stripes which will later become pick up designs!

A Christmas present for my sister!

This time I made the scrolls out of the DARK brown  instead of the light brown on the small piece.  The pieces are opposites.  

The first one (from yesterdays post) is 19 inches long before fringe.  This one is 49 inches long before fringe.  Out of a 9 1/2 foot long warp I got about 6 feet.  More waste than usual as I knew I didn't want a 9 foot table runner/scarf.  So I cut off the first piece retied onto the front beam and started again.  I have found that the thicker the fabric roll on the front beam the more difficult a time I have with my tension.  I have also discovered that unrolling the already produced fabric to look at the results of my labor will also create tension problems at times. 

Since I rarely use a chart and make up my patterns as I go...it gets a little difficult to be sure of spacing and symmetry unless I unroll back to the beginning and take a look.  Bad habit!

Anyway I almost wet my pants when I finally got to unroll this piece and look at the finished product.  All my own color choices and design factors.  

I don't think I will be doing scrolls again any time soon.  LOL

I wrote this post on Thanksgiving Day and I also posted pictures on Weavolution and Ravelry.  Later in the day, all fat and happy with turkey, I checked my mail and found the latest post from Laverne Waddington on her blog.  She has backstrap groups on each website as well!


The biggest surprise though is that she has once again, posted pictures of my work.  Click here if you want to read a very interesting and informative blog. 

Here are the pictures.

Friday was playday!

Yesterday, Friday the 19th, I spent the day with my first real close friend in Moultrie.  (Aside from my room mate who I have known for many years.)

The weather was beautiful, the company could not have been better, good home cooked food EVEN BETTER!  She has a wonder place very much off the beaten path.  Deep in the wood where we even had a bonfire.  I felt like I had gone home, to St. Augustine, for the day.  I feel very relaxed and invigorated.  Re-energized for lack of a better word.

We chattered all day and I gave a lesson in Rigid Heddle weaving.  My friend of course, is the woman who bought my Rigid Heddle loom.  Can't believe I forgot the camera.

She is all warped up with her first cotton kitchen washcloth half way to  completion!  She should get two or three out of that warp.  I think she is going to prefer this kind of weaving to tapestry.  We'll see.

She is a joy to spend time with as well as having a wonderful aptitude for what we are doing.  Extra nice to have someone I can converse with in my favorite art medium that is actually interested and knows what I am talking about.  As compared to that deer in the headlights look I get from alot of folks.

I can only hope that someday I can repay her for that wonderful 'Friday play-day'!  To Dana I can only say Thank you.  You know who you are.

I made scrolls!

This is what I have done so far with the wide warp!  I was afraid that the scrolls I graphed would be too busy on the striped background.  I love it though!  This will be a phone pouch for an I phone.

And this is the deer horn pick my friend, Dana's fella made for me!  He probably thinks I am strange at best, little does he know that this is one of the coolest gifts ever!

Needle Arts at the Housing Authority!

This is my 4th week as an instructor for the Needle arts workshops at the Housing Authority here in Moultrie, GA.  This is also the first time I had any students.  AND I HAD 5!!!!  COUNT THEM 5!!!

We started out with crochet, but it seems there is a bit of a learning curve here...for me.  I am going to have to find a way to get on the same page as my ladies.  We ended up using the little plastic pot holder looms.  They loved them!  Took them home with them and all said that they would be back next week.

I truly hope that they do!  I think I can add a little something to their lives.  

I finally have something to be "  Thankful" for, just in the nick of time for "  Thanksgiving day!"

I want to wish all of you my faithful followers and cyber friends a very "  Happy Turkey day!"   from my heart to yours.

Second half of the Green warp

I just wanted to share.  This is the rest of the green warp that gave me fits.  I finished it on Wednesday the 17th...I have a little niece that is into green.  I think I will make 2 little envelope bags that match for her out of these.  I actually like these bands.  This comes as a surprise since I hated the warp AND it gave me tension issues.  They turned out really well.  I love the larger designs.  I think my favorite is my version of the little 'person'.  I embellished the design I found and used on the other band, the little 'man person' and tried to get a female.  She is shaped a little funny, reminds me of a witch...LOL.  But cute right?

Anyway here are the pictures.

What's on the Loom????

I am soooooo proud!  Wait till you see what I did.  Today is Thursday, Nov. 18th.  For six hours today I measured a warp and mounted it on the Gilmore Mini Wave.  I did 9 1/2 feet and all 100 threads wide.  That means 100 threads in each of the two sheds.  I MAXED out the loom.  The piece is going to be horizontal stripe pick up technique and I had to do a little yarn husbanding.  I really wanted to try doing a piece entirely in #3 cotton crochet thread, but the cones are so small I had to supplement and place some #10 in two shades of red in the center of the warp.  I warped with a double cross the way I learned to do it on Laverne Waddington's blog.

The colors have a beautiful sheen and it is just so pretty I had to share.  So far I have only woven 30 passes to set the weave.  I will have an 80 thread wide area for pattern.  The colors are #3 natural, #3 copper, #3 coffee, #10 red, #10 burgundy.  I wasn't sure I would like it being so many colors but it is AWESOME!  I also seem to have my tension well under control at this point.  Woohoo!!!!!

Here are some pictures!  I am so excited I can't even decide on a pattern yet.........